by Rebecca Lim
He looks up at me and says, ‘Ready?’
He smiles, and there’s so much youth and love and eagerness in his eyes that I feel a terrible foreboding.
If You’re listening, I think feverishly, keep him safe. Let him survive me.
‘It’s been fun, kids,’ Gia murmurs, looking into our faces intently before handing me the backpack to sling over my shoulder. ‘But con te partiro, as they say in the classics: time to say goodbye.’
I can’t help the chill I feel at her words as she and Tommy walk Ryan and me to the door.
Gia tells Carlo to take us down to the car and her expression is very severe.
‘It’s been real,’ she drawls in her posh voice, her eyes suspiciously bright. ‘You ever at a loose end, you look me up, you hear?’
Ryan enfolds Gia and her spiky jacket in a careful bear hug before shaking Tommy’s hand awkwardly.
‘I don’t know what you’re thanking me for,’ Tommy snipes lightly, ‘seeing as how I practically vandalised you.’
He gives me a nod, frowning slightly as he struggles again to place where he could possibly know me from.
Gia just glares at me, sounding choked up. ‘Don’t touch me, don’t even say anything, or I will cry. Now get out of here. And use your powers for good, not evil, got that?’
Carlo opens the door and ushers us out into the hallway like unwelcome guests. And just like that, the door is shut behind us, and Irina and I are done. I don’t think I will ever lay eyes on her again, except maybe on a magazine cover, and I almost feel something like regret.
Ryan puts a hand in the small of my back as we walk towards the lift and I imagine I can feel it burning there.
‘Thank you,’ he says softly, ‘for finding Gia, for doing that for me.’
I’m suddenly so indignant, so furious, on his behalf that my reply comes out more harshly than I intended. ‘For putting you first for a change? The way no one ever did while Lauren was gone?’
In reply, he lifts my curtain of dark, curling hair and kisses the back of my neck once, lightly. I actually shiver. As he lets my hair fall back down, he trails his fingers through its ends before returning his hand to the small of my back.
‘There are ways to play with fire,’ he says lightly, ‘without getting burnt.’
And I shiver again, inside.
We follow Carlo into the sound-deadening lift and Ryan’s eyes widen in surprise as he catches his own reflection from seemingly infinite angles. I dig through the backpack before the lift doors open onto the ground floor and hand Ryan the cap and the tortoiseshell frames with the clear lenses, both of which he puts on reluctantly.
‘I might not know the first thing about fashion,’ he complains, taking the ugly backpack from me and shouldering it, ‘but even I know that right now I look like the world’s biggest dork.’
‘It’s what’s on the inside that counts, darling,’ I remind him acidly as we renegotiate the glittering lobby, the slow sweep of the continuously turning front door, Carlo leading the way.
The black limousine with the gleaming silver hood ornament of a winged woman in flight is waiting for us right by the hotel entrance, ostentatiously blocking the upper curve of the circular driveway. A few guests stare curiously as Carlo, Ryan and I approach the car, because we don’t look rich and we sure as hell don’t look famous.
Carlo opens the rear door, saying solemnly, ‘Signor,’ and Ryan ducks awkwardly to get his head and lanky frame into the vehicle before lowering himself into the seat on the far side. Already lying across the seats opposite him are the two couture gowns in their protective sheaths. There’s an opaque screen up between us and the driver.
‘Get that lowered,’ I tell Carlo sharply. ‘And tell him to keep it down. I need to be able to see the road ahead.’
Carlo taps on the driver’s side window immediately. The opaque screen vanishes smoothly and I see that our driver is the man Gia had been arguing with, his face even unhappier, even more tight-lipped, than when I last saw it. Carlo gives him last-minute instructions in rapid, low-voiced Italian, then says coolly, without the slightest hint of recognition, ‘Signorina,’ and hands me in after Ryan and slams the door.
He thumps on the roof of the limo and the car sails smoothly away from the kerb. We’re down the hotel drive and on our way before Ryan’s even finished his awestruck inspection of the limo’s interior.
‘I always wanted to ride in one of these!’ he exclaims, wriggling deeper into his seat with appreciation, before raising the wide leather-clad armrest that separates us and putting his arm around me as if it’s the most natural thing in the world. He looks out the tinted window beside him for a moment, then back at me, his warm, deep voice teasing. ‘Buses and trains not good enough for you people?’
But that’s just it. It’s so loony it’s almost implausible: an archangel, a human, two evening dresses and a stretch limousine. It sounds like the start of a joke, but it just might work.
I turn my head and stare out the window, seeing not the man-made canyons of stone rising all around us, the watercolour sky, but Nuriel’s vulnerable face and pleading eyes. And I feel a sudden flash of anger so intense that it curls the fingers of my left hand where they rest upon my leg, as if I am grasping the hilt of a mighty sword. As we sweep up Via Bochetto, that small voice inside me whispers: For the time of their punishment is coming. In a chauffeured, armoured car with a built-in minibar and surround sound.
‘This is the last thing they’ll expect,’ I murmur, so quietly that Ryan has to bend his head to hear me. ‘They’re never going to see us coming. It’s perfect.’
It’s mid-afternoon, the sky a pale blue with just the faintest ripple of cloud, like the way the wind can carve patterns in a sand dune. Even with the detours and roadblocks we encounter at almost every turn, Moltrasio is only a short distance away to the north. We should be there well before nightfall.
Ryan has fallen asleep again, his mouth slightly open, his head tilted at an awkward angle against the side of the car. I scan the rooflines of all the buildings we pass; the people getting into and out of vehicles, moving along the sidewalks in their sleek furs and overcoats, holding briefcases, satchels and shopping bags; the motorcyclists in full leathers, the scooter riders in their retro-looking helmets, some with passengers riding pillion. In and amongst this sea of seething life, of human defiance, I’m searching for errant gleams of light that refuse to obey the laws of physics; beings of fire masquerading as ordinary men and women. But all I see is that Christmas is coming. It’s in the neon signs everywhere, the sparkling electric lights and happy, tacky decorations taped to windows and doors.
As we navigate the narrow streets filled with aggressive drivers and raucous groups of handsome, olive-skinned young men and women, I realise something. It’s a change so stealthy, yet so fundamental, that it takes me some time to understand it. But when I do, I’m electrified, and my gaze transfers wildly from my window back to Ryan’s, then to the front windscreen, in disbelief. Something has happened to my eyesight. Or, at least, to the way I perceive language. The street signs and shopfronts we drive past haven’t changed overnight, but I have. I can read everything. Any language, any script, I register it for what it is: Italian or Chinese, German, Arabic, Korean, Turkish, Hebrew or Hindi. Wherever words or characters occur — scrawled across the windows of tobacconists and takeaway shops, spelt out in electric lights outside bars and restaurants, furriers, mini-marts and low-rent fashion emporia — I discern their meaning immediately.
For block after block, my eyes move across words and phrases in languages I don’t even recall knowing. That ancient ability I must once have possessed — to speak all the tongues of men, and of angels — has somehow been restored with my own restoration. Half of me wants to wake Ryan to tell him — because these days he’s always in my thoughts, almost my first consideration, like a running snatch of music that won’t leave me alone. But the other half, the sensible half, tells me to let him sleep, that I’m
already freaky enough in his eyes without making myself seem even freakier.
I relax a little in my seat the further we get from the city. The streets are still crowded with vehicles and people, lights and blaring noise and signs in every language under the sun, but I can’t see that we’re being followed, or even monitored. And I wonder what it’s cost Michael and the others to keep Luc at bay in order that I might escape.
I know that I shouldn’t still be here, should already have left the face of this world far behind me. But as I glance across at Ryan sleeping, I know why I can’t leave.
As we hit the autostrada, passing under signage for Lake Como, I take Ryan’s hand in mine, overcome by the simple need to touch him. He awakens immediately.
‘What did I miss?’ he says quickly, looking around. ‘Why didn’t you wake me sooner?’
We approach a turn-off marked Malpensa and traffic suddenly slows to a crawl. It continues this way for over an hour, and the source of the hold-up becomes clear the closer we get to a massive police roadblock that’s been set up across the breadth of the motorway near signage that reads Como Monte Olimpino. Every car ahead of us is being rerouted to the west. Beyond the roadblock is a mess of police vans, cars and motorbikes, and beyond them, the motorway to the east stretches out emptily, like the kind of roadway you might glimpse in a dream.
I see our driver’s neck, his head, go rigid with tension. Though he’s speaking softly beneath his breath, I understand every word of the guttural, colourful Italian invective he uses. Of all the days, he’s thinking. Of all the places. Why me?
When it’s our turn, a single policeman steps forward from the large uniformed group that’s edgily talking and joking there, some great and secret fear on all their faces. Our driver slides down his window, explains in Italian that we are rich foreigners, friends of the St Alban family with urgent business in Moltrasio.
The young, clean-shaven, blue-eyed policeman in his dark peaked cap and handsome uniform — a fitted navy jacket with gold seals, knee-high black boots and tight-fitting breeches with a contrast band running up the side — replies coldly in the same tongue, ‘Residents only, no exceptions.’
‘They are expected,’ the driver wheedles, and I hear the deep unease in his voice. ‘They have a letter.’
‘I don’t care if it’s a letter from God,’ the policeman barks, ‘residents only. Move left.’
I release Ryan’s hand and lean across him to hook up the backpack before depressing the button set into the contoured armrest in my door.
‘I’ll take it from here,’ I tell the driver in fluent Italian as my window slides down.
The dark-tinted driver’s side window is smoothly re-engaged and our driver points his blunt and craggy face forward once more, but I can tell from his stillness that he’s listening.
The policeman takes a step back in surprise, placing one hand on the weapon on his hip, before recovering. He looks me over coolly, Ryan, too, and I don’t look away. To Ryan’s credit, neither does he. I open the backpack and take out the letter of introduction.
‘Your Italian is remarkably good for a “rich foreigner”,’ the policeman says sardonically. ‘So you will understand very well when I tell you again that only residents are permitted past this point.’
‘Read the letter,’ I plead, handing it to him. He takes it reluctantly. ‘It is signed by Signora AgnelliRe herself on behalf of Atelier Re. We are expected at Villa Nicolin, by Bianca St Alban.’ I see the police officer’s eyes flicker as I name-drop shamelessly. I point out the two gowns lying across from me. ‘We are already late.’
The young man’s countenance wavers for a moment before his expression hardens again. ‘I’m sorry, signorina, but we have our orders. Some roads are impassable. The dead — they are still being recovered.’
‘Please,’ I say quietly. ‘Read the letter. Call the number you see there. It was Giovanni Re’s dying wish that Signorina St Alban have these gowns. I know that you know who he was, that he was a great man. A true Milanese, and a good person. I don’t have much time. It’s imperative that I deliver these gowns today.’
The police officer takes his time reading the letter before returning his gaze to me. Then he turns on his heel and walks back to the contingent of armed men and women strung out loosely along the barricade and I see him confer with several of them, each person scanning the letter, surprised.
Somewhere behind us, an unwise driver lets loose a few impatient blasts on his car horn, which sets off a bunch of other drivers. Through my open window, I see several of the officers peel away from the roadblock, wending through the gridlocked traffic on foot in search of the jokers responsible.
‘We’re holding everyone up,’ Ryan murmurs, frowning. ‘What’s happening out there?’
The young policeman is nowhere to be seen.
‘Maybe he’s calling that number,’ I reply, more confidently than I’m feeling. ‘Gia had it all worked out, they’ve got to let us through.’
We wait, silently and on edge, the smell of smoke and ashes drifting in through my open window, slowly poisoning the air inside the car.
A flurry of activity at one end of the roadblock draws my gaze. I see cars and vans being shifted around to allow a helmeted police officer on a motorbike to roar through the gap that’s been created. He executes a tight loop around our limo, before pulling up to my open window, engine growling, the front wheel of the bike facing the gap in the barricade. He pushes up the visor of his helmet with one black-gloved hand and I recognise the young officer’s cool, blue-eyed gaze immediately.
‘I’ll escort you to the Villa Nicolin personally,’ he says curtly. ‘Look neither right nor left or you will have cause to regret your curiosity.’
He snaps his visor down and accelerates away from us, and a few seconds later our driver is sliding the car past the hard-eyed policemen and women, past the jumble of blue and white police vehicles.
My hand finds its way into Ryan’s automatically, gripping it tight.
The road rises, winding gently, and Ryan and I take in the tiers of low-rise buildings with terracotta-coloured roofs nestled into the foothills all around us, the late-afternoon sun giving them an almost rosy cast. It’s so incredibly beautiful when we see the lake for the first time, ringed by tall pines and graceful dwellings, the snow-capped peaks of distant mountains rising behind.
‘What do you think he could have meant about not looking around?’ Ryan says wonderingly as we follow the shore of the lake, the road strangely deserted. ‘I’ve never seen a place as beautiful as this, ever.’
But that pervasive smell — of smoke, of ashes — is growing stronger. And I begin to discern patches of darkness in the distant canopy; a strange, dark blot upon the handsome facade of a dusky rose-coloured villa built right up against a curve in the shoreline, far across the lake. As we enter the main street of Moltrasio — a narrow canyon of shopfronts built shoulder to shoulder in cheerful colours — the first thing that hits me is the utter desolation, followed by the realisation that it’s filled with people.
There’s a fire crew still hosing down the smoking ruins of what must once have been a wine shop, because a river of melted glass seems to flow out of it, into a car park filled with the remains of vehicles, similarly rendered down into a kind of metallic tallow. We drive without stopping past the shattered front windows of a burnt-out delicatessen; a photographer’s studio hollowed out by fire that’s missing most of its front facade; a shoe store that retains a front door but is now open to the sky. Our driver has to slow several times to navigate over or past jumbles of semi-liquefied stone and concrete, brick, steel grillework and tile; around dangerous cracks and potholes that have opened in the road.
Through the ruins move ash-covered figures, drifting as if dazed, bending to scrabble through the rubble on the ground as if they’ve misplaced something, or raising their hands to the sky, faces twisted in agony. None of them seem to engage with the uniformed emergency personnel who are stru
ggling to shore up structures on the brink of collapse, their desperate shouts piercing the hazy air.
Moltrasio was only partially destroyed, Juliana said. This scene must be amplified in town after town all along the lake from here to Domaso. I clench my left fist, feeling that old agony rising in me.
‘What is that?’ Ryan’s voice cuts across my thoughts.
He draws my attention to a shadowy stencil on a honey-coloured shopfront wall just ahead. It’s a weird kind of graffiti — like the rough outline of a man drawn freehand in a faint, powdery, black substance, like charcoal.
Beside the strange image stands a tall man, bald-headed, slack-faced, his suit, skin, eyes and hair covered in a thick grey dust, no hint of colour about him, not even a rim of pink around the eyes. He might be made from ash — even the whites of his eyes seem ashy. He raises both arms towards me, palms upward, as we pass him in our car, as if pleading for help. And that’s when I see it. The shape of him. The shape of the shadowy stencil rendered on that shopfront wall.
‘Did you see him?’ I whisper to Ryan. ‘The streets are filled with people just like him.’
I turn and kneel up on my seat to look out the rear window at the man standing by the wall, as if anchored there by his pain. His eyes follow our car in numb supplication. I point him out to Ryan, who is kneeling on his seat, too, scanning the war zone we’re leaving behind us.
‘What people?’ he asks. ‘All I can see are search crews. But it doesn’t look like there’s anyone left alive to find out there.’
And then horror seizes me fully and I understand what that man is. What all those drifting, dazed and voiceless people are, so divorced from all the frantic activity around them. They are those that Azraeil had no use for, those who were not blameless. And that mark on the wall? It was the agony of one man’s passing, caught there in his own life’s blood.